Determining a size and demographic of an audience of a media presentation helps media providers and distributors schedule programming and determine a price for advertising presented during the programming. Accurate estimates of audience demographics also enable advertisers to target advertisements to certain types and sizes of audiences. To collect these demographics, an audience measurement entity enlists a group of media consumers (often called panelists) to cooperate in an audience measurement study (often called a panel) for some length of time. The media exposure habits and demographic data associated with these enlisted media consumers are collected and used to statistically determine the size and demographics of the entire audience of the media presentation. In some examples, this collected data (e.g., data collected via measurement devices) may be supplemented with survey information, for example, recorded manually by the presentation audience members.
In some examples, the audience measurement entity obtains (e.g., directly, or indirectly from a media service provider) return path data from media presentation devices (e.g., set-top boxes) that identifies tuning data for the media presentation devices. However, the return path data may not include any demographic data concerning the individuals and/or households associated with the media presentation devices. Thus, in some such examples, the audience measurement entity models and/or assigns synthetic (e.g., virtual) individuals and/or households to represent demographic data associated with the return path data.
The figures are not to scale. Wherever possible, the same reference numbers will be used throughout the drawing(s) and accompanying written description to refer to the same or like parts, elements, etc.